Mitchell postgame quotes

WIllie Mitchell’s postgame thoughts…

(on ending the trip with a win…)
MITCHELL: “I think we’re definitely happy about it. In Chicago, we felt we should have got better results. We were all over the net and we felt we outplayed them, but that’s the Stanley Cup champs and Turcs [Marty Turco] played really well. Tonight we definitely didn’t play our game at the start, and we got a couple bounces to kind of get our momentum going. Maybe it was a little bit of karma, for not getting the bounces the night before. These games are really, really important — the back-to-backs — at the end of the year, especially against a division opponent, when you’re trying to win the division. Good teams find a way to win them, and tonight we did so it’s a good stepping stone for the team.”

(on holding it together defensively without Doughty…)
MITCHELL: “It’s the ebb and flow. With a great player like that, you see it in every sport, in Major League Baseball, you see it in the NFL. When you lose a good player like that, everyone tries to elevate their game and play a little bit better. So in the short term, I think you can buy time and play well after losing a player like that. Over the long term, definitely he’s a guy that is missed, there’s no doubt. But we’ve been doing a good job, and hopefully someone upstairs gets him healthy in a hurry and we can get back with a full lineup, because obviously that’s a big dimension to our game, on the offensive side and on the back end and on our power play.”

(on being surprised by his goal…)
MITCHELL: “Yeah, a little bit. I was surprised at the defenseman. After I poked it, he kind of stepped up and Zeus kind of had a step on his guy to the net, so I was trying to find him going to the net. If you throw it around the net, once in a while you get a bounce, and it was a good bounce for us.”